New business is a numbers game

Just not the numbers you think.

There's an old school view of new business that goes something like this: volume is everything. Make enough calls, send enough emails, throw enough mud at the wall and the law of averages will do the rest.

It's not entirely wrong, outreach does require consistency and persistence, and anyone who tells you otherwise is probably trying to sell you something passive and magical. But pure volume is a diminishing game. Clients are drowning in generic outreach, plus the minute you stop, everything dries up. 

But new business is still a numbers game. However it’s not the number of likes, send volumes or even - dare I say it - meetings you should be thinking about. Here are the ones you should.

10

The average B2B client buying cycle is now ten months, and it's getting longer. At a new business event years ago I heard Camilla Honey from JFDI (best business name ever) say “new business is like asparagus. It takes at least two years to cultivate.” She was right then and she's right now. New business should be measured in quarters and years, not days and weeks.

The agencies that build sustainable new business pipelines are the ones who treat it as a long game, not a quarterly panic. If your new business programme has a 90-day review with an implicit threat attached, you've already misunderstood the timeline.

What this means in practice: plan for a minimum of six months before you judge whether anything is working. Build your activity accordingly.

95/5

The principle developed by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute of Marketing Science which states that at any given time, 95% of your potential buyers are "out-of-market" and not ready to buy, while only 5% are actively looking to purchase. If you only target the in-market buyers you’re both too late to the party against a shortlist that was already forming before you made contact,  and also completely invisible to the 95% who will eventually become buyers, and who are forming views about which agencies exist, stand for something and are worth talking to, right now.

What this means in practice: new business isn't just sales. It's marketing. Being consistently visible, useful and distinctive to people who aren't ready to buy yet is not a vanity exercise, it's how you get on the longlist before the brief even exists.

60/40

The balance of long and short. What, you thought Binet & Field only applied to brands? New business is more than just outreach. It's marketing and sales together, basically brand and performance. And most agencies do it completely backwards.

They invest almost nothing in building their own brand - their reputation, their positioning, their visibility in the market - and then wonder why their outreach isn't converting. Clients often genuinely don't know who's in the market, let alone what agencies stand for. It's one of the reasons intermediaries exist. 

What this means in practice: your new business investment needs a meaningful chunk of time, budget and creative energy on your own marketing. Not just outreach. If you're only doing the latter, you're at roughly 40% capacity.

7

This is an oldie but a goodie. A prospective client needs to encounter your agency around seven times before you meaningfully register on their radar. Not seven cold emails.  Seven meaningful interactions, a piece of content that made them think, an event where you said something worth remembering, a recommendation from someone they trust, an email that landed at exactly the right moment.

Most new business programmes don't fail because the idea was wrong. They fail because they run out of momentum. Consistency isn't glamorous, but it's load-bearing.

What this means in practice: before you start any outreach, ask honestly whether you have enough substance behind it to sustain seven meaningful touchpoints. If not, build the substance first.

~25,000

That's the approximate number of agencies in the UK, according to AgencybyAgency, across every discipline and size. The challenge that number represents isn't one of oversupply, it's one of differentiation. In a market that crowded, being good isn't enough to get found. Being clear about what you do, who for, and why you, that's what separates the agencies that get called from the ones that have to do all the calling.

What this means in practice: ask yourself if your positioning is clear. Clear who you’re for, and why. And if not go and work on it (and your ICP) It’s the bedrock of new business.

The numbers you should actually be tracking

This isn’t a definitive list but they include:

Your funnel

Not a generic template, but a model that reflects your sector, your sales cycle and your actual process. Put numbers against each stage. Where are leads coming in? Where are they dropping out? Where do opportunities stall? You can't improve what you can't see.

Your opportunity scorecard pass mark

Qualifying out is as important as qualifying in, and if you don’t know what a good opportunity looks like to you, you’ll be wasting time, effort and resources on opportunities you’re never going to win.  Define what a genuinely good opportunity looks like for you: how well you know the client, how well matched the brief is, how many others are in the process, what’s the budget (is there a budget?!), whether you're pitching against the incumbent. Weight the criteria. Score every opportunity against them. And then have the discipline to say no to anything that doesn't make the grade. 

Your attrition rate

There's no point chasing new business if you're losing existing clients out the back door because you're neglecting them. You're five times more likely to win work from an existing client than a new one. The best new business strategy in the world won't compensate for a leaky bucket.

And one number not to be a slave to

Meetings. Pursue them, yes. Track them, yes. You need something to aim for and a benchmark to measure against. But meetings as a pure volume target are how you end up in a lot of rooms where nobody is quite sure why they're there.

If you're not hitting your meetings target, the question isn't how do you get more meetings. It's why aren't you. Is your positioning sharp enough that prospects immediately understand why they should talk to you? Is your targeting specific enough that you're reaching people with a genuine reason to be interested? Is your outreach arriving at the right time, with the right message, backed by enough brand presence that you're not a cold stranger?

The number of meetings is a symptom. The health of everything behind it is the diagnosis.

So what does this all add up to?

New business is hard because most agencies treat it as a single thing - usually outreach - when it's actually a system. Positioning feeds targeting. Marketing feeds outreach. Brand-building feeds conversion. The long game feeds the short game.

The numbers above aren't a checklist. They're a way of seeing your new business effort as a whole. Where the pressure points are, where the gaps are, and where you're likely kidding yourself about what's working.

Get the system right, track the right things, and the meetings, and the opportunities, will follow.